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CHAPTER IV
MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL
PROTECTION OF CHILDREN
No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly
to the social consciousness of a generation than
has that of commercialized vice in the conscious-
ness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is
simply another evidence that human nature has
a curious power of callous indifference towards
evils which have been so entrenched that they
seem part of that which has always been.
Educators of course share this attitude; at
moments they seem to intensify it, although at
last an educational movement in the direction
of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools and
colleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the
child's first questionings regarding the beginnings
of human life and approach the subject through
simple biological instruction which at least
places this knowledge on a par with other natural
facts. Such teaching is an enormous advance
for the children whose curiosity would otherwise [98]
have been satisfied from poisonous sources and
who would have learned of simple physiological
matters from such secret undercurrents of cor-
rupt knowledge as to have forever perverted
their minds. Yet this first direct step towards
an adequate educational approach to this sub-
ject has been surprisingly difficult owing to the
self-consciousness of grown-up people; for while
the children receive the teaching quite simply,
their parents often take alarm. Doubtless co-
operation with parents will be necessary before
the subject can fall into its proper place in the
schools. In Chicago, the largest women's club
in the city has established normal courses in
sex hygiene attended both by teachers and
mothers, the National and State Federations of
Women's Clubs are gradually preparing thou-
sands of women throughout America for fuller
co-operation with the schools in this difficult
matter. In this, as in so many other educational
movements, Germany has led the way. Two
publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which
promote not only more effective legislation but
more adequate instruction in the schools on this
basic subject. These journals are supported [99]
by men and women anxious for light for the
sake of their children. Some of them were first
stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama
"The Awakening of Spring," which, with Teu-
tonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the
lesson that death and degradation may be the
fate of a group of gifted school-children, because
of the cowardly reticence of their parents.
A year ago the Bishop of London gathered
together a number of influential people and
laid before them his convictions that the root
of the social evil lay in so-called "parental
modesty," and that in the quickening of the
parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting
up of England's moral tone which has for so long
been the despair of England's foremost men."
In America the eighth year-book of the National
Society for the Scientific Study of Education
treats of this important subject with great
ability, massing the agencies and methods in
impressive array. Many other educational jour-
nals and organized societies could be cited as
expressing a new conscience in regard to this
world-old evil. The expert educational opinion
which they represent is practically agreed that [100]
for older children the instruction should not be
confined to biology and hygiene, but may come
quite naturally in history and literature, which
record and portray the havoc wrought by the
sexual instinct when uncontrolled, and also
show that, when directed and spiritualized, it
has become an inspiration to the loftiest devo-
tions and sacrifices. The youth thus taught
sees this primal instinct not only as an essential
to the continuance of the race, but also, when
it is transmuted to the highest ends, as a funda-
mental factor in social progress. The entire
subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns
that his own struggle is a common experience.
He is able to make his own interpretations and
to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing
companions. After all, no young person will be
able to control his impulses and to save himself
from the grosser temptations, unless he has been
put under the sway of nobler influences. Per-
haps we have yet to learn that the inhibitions of
character as well as its reinforcements come most
readily through idealistic motives.
Certainly all the great religions of the world
have recognized youth's need of spiritual help [101]
during the trying years of adolescence. The
ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this
instinct almost to the exclusion of others, and all
later religions attempt to provide the youth with
shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies
ahead of him, for the wise men in every age have
known that only the power of the spirit can
overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this
educational advance, courses of study in many
public and private schools are still prepared
exactly as if educators had never known that at
fifteen or sixteen years of age, the will power
being still weak, the bodily desires are keen and
insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyt-
tleton, who has given much thought to this
gap in the education of youth says, "The certain
result of leaving an enormous majority of boys
unguided and uninstructed in a matter where
their strongest passions are concerned, is that they
grow up to judge of all questions connected with
it, from a purely selfish point of view." He con-
tends that this selfishness is due to the fact that
any single suggestion or hint which boys receive
on the subject comes from other boys or young
men who are under the same potent influences of [102]
ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No
wholesome counter-balance of knowledge is given,
no attempt is made to invest the subject with
dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare
of others and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton
contends that this alone can explain the pecul-
iarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women
which is a sustained cruelty to be discerned in
no other relation of English life. To quote him
again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty
are not birds or beasts but our own country-
women, doomed by the hundred thousand to a
life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery,
then and then only the general average tone of
young men becomes hard and brutally callous or
frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not ex-
hibited in relation to any other form of human
suffering." At the present moment thousands of
young people in our great cities possess no other
knowledge of this grave social evil which may at
any moment become a dangerous personal men-
ace, save what is imparted to them in this
brutal flippant spirit. It has been said that the
child growing up in the midst of civilization
receives from its parents and teachers something [103]
of the accumulated experience of the world on
all other subjects save upon that of sex. On this
one subject alone each generation learns little
from its predecessors.
An educator has lately pointed out that it is
an old lure of vice to pretend that it alone deals
with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that
the higher planes of life contain anything but
chilly sentiments. He contends that young peo-
ple are therefore prone to receive moralizing
and admonitions with polite attention, but when
it comes to action, they carefully observe the life
about them in order to conduct themselves in such
wise as to be part of the really desirable world
inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to this
attitude, many young people living in our cities
at the present moment have failed to appre-
hend the admonitions of religion and have never
responded to its inner control. It is as if the
impact of the world had stunned their spiritual
natures, and as if this had occurred at the very
time that a most dangerous experiment is being
tried. The public gaieties formerly allowed in
Catholic countries where young people were [104]
restrained by the confessional, are now permitted
in cities where this restraint is altogether un-
known to thousands of young people, and only
faintly and traditionally operative upon thou-
sands of others. The puritanical history of
American cities assumes that these gaieties are
forbidden, and that the streets are sober and
decorous for conscientious young men and women
who need no external protection. This un-
grounded assumption, united to the fact that no
adult has the confidence of these young people,
who are constantly subjected to a multitude of
imaginative impressions, is almost certain to
result disastrously.
The social relationships in a modern city are
so hastily made and often so superficial, that the
old human restraints of public opinion, long sus-
tained in smaller communities, have also broken
down. Thousands of young men and women in
every great city have received none of the lessons
in self-control which even savage tribes imparted
to their children when they taught them to master
their appetites as well as their emotions. These
young people are perhaps further from all com-
munity restraint and genuine social control than [105]
the youth of the community have ever been in
the long history of civilization. Certainly only
the modern city has offered at one and the same
time every possible stimulation for the lower
nature and every opportunity for secret vice.
Educators apparently forget that this unre-
strained stimulation of young people, so charac-
teristic of our cities, although developing very
rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not
yet seen the outcome. The present education of
the average young man has given him only the
most unreal protection against the tempta-
tions of the city. Schoolboys are subjected to
many lures from without just at the moment
when they are filled with an inner tumult which
utterly bewilders them and concerning which
no one has instructed them save in terms of
empty precept and unintelligible warning.
We are authoritatively told that the physical
difficulties are enormously increased by uncon-
trolled or perverted imaginations, and all sound
advice to young men in regard to this subject
emphasizes a clean mind, exhorts an imagination
kept free from sensuality and insists upon days
filled with wholesome athletic interests. We [106]
allow this regime to be exactly reversed for thou-
sands of young people living in the most crowded
and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not
only does the stage in its advertisements exhibit
all the allurements of sex to such an extent that
a play without a "love interest" is considered
foredoomed to failure, but the novels which form
the sole reading of thousands of young men and
girls deal only with the course of true or simulated
love, resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in
variegated misfortunes.
Often the only recreation possible for young
men and young women together is dancing, in
which it is always easy to transgress the pro-
prieties. In many public dance halls, however,
improprieties are deliberately fostered. The
waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the
couples leaning heavily on each other barely
move across the floor, all the jollity and bracing
exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as is
all the careful decorum of the formal dance.
The efforts to obtain pleasure or to feed the imagi-
nation are thus converged upon the senses which
it is already difficult for young people to under-
stand and to control. It is therefore not remark- [107]
able that in certain parts of the city groups of
idle young men are found whose evil imagina-
tions have actually inhibited their power for
normal living. On the streets or in the pool-
rooms where they congregate their conversa-
tion, their tales of adventure, their remarks upon
women who pass by, all reveal that they have been
caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and
primal that when left without direction it can
easily overwhelm its possessor and swamp his
faculties. These young men, who do no regular
work, who expect to be supported by their
mothers and sisters and to get money for the
shows and theatres by any sort of disreputable
undertaking, are in excellent training for the life
of the procurer, and it is from such groups that
they are recruited. There is almost a system
of apprenticeship, for boys when very small act
as "look-outs" and are later utilized to make
acquaintances with girls in order to introduce
them to professionals. From this they gradually
learn the method of procuring girls and at last
do an independent business. If one boy is suc-
cessful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance
runs the rumor that a girl is an asset that will [108]
bring a larger return than can possibly be earned
in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations
of these young men have been controlled and
cultivated, could the desire for adventure have
been directed into wholesome channels, could
these idle boys have been taught that, so far from
being manly they were losing all virility, could
higher interests have been aroused and standards
given them in relation to this one aspect of life,
the entire situation of commercialized vice would
be a different thing.
The girls with a desire for adventure seem con-
fined to this one dubious outlet even more than
the boys, although there are only one-eighth as
many delinquent girls as boys brought into the
juvenile court in Chicago, the charge against
the girls in almost every instance involves a loss
of chastity. One of them who was vainly en-
deavoring to formulate the causes of her downfall,
concentrated them all in the single statement
that she wanted the other girls to know that she
too was a "good Indian." Such a girl, while
she is not an actual member of a gang of boys,
is often attached to one by so many loyalties and
friendships that she will seldom testify against [109]
a member, even when she has been injured by
him. She also depends upon the gang when she
requires bail in the police court or the protection
that comes from political influence, and she is
often very proud of her quasi-membership. The
little girls brought into the juvenile court are
usually daughters of those poorest immigrant fam-
ilies living in the worst type of city tenements,
who are frequently forced to take boarders in
order to pay the rent. A surprising number of
little girls have first become involved in wrong-
doing through the men of their own households.
A recent inquiry among 130 girls living in a sor-
did red light district disclosed the fact that a
majority of them had thus been victimized and
the wrong had come to them so early that
they had been despoiled at an average age of
eight years. Looking upon the forlorn little crea-
tures, who are often brought into the Chicago
juvenile court to testify against their own rela-
tives, one is seized with that curious compunc-
tion Goethe expressed in the now hackneyed
line from "Mignon:"
"Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?"
One is also inclined to reproach educators for [110]
neglecting to give children instruction in play
when one sees the unregulated amusement parks
which are apparently so dangerous to little girls
twelve or fourteen years old. Because they
are childishly eager for amusement and totally
unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway
or for a ticket to an entertainment, these
disappointed children easily accept many favors
from the young men who are standing near the
entrances for the express purpose of ruining them.
The hideous reward which is demanded from
them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed
the many" treats" which the amusement park
offers, apparently seems of little moment. Their
childish minds are filled with the memory of the
lurid pleasures to the oblivion of the later expe-
rience, and they eagerly tell their companions of
this possibility "of getting in to all the shows."
These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a
crowd of honest people seeking recreation after a
long day's work, groups of older girls walking and
talking gaily with young men of their acquaint-
ance, and happy children holding their parents'
hands. This cruel exploitation of the childish
eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only [111]
among a certain type of forlorn city children who
are totally without standards and into whose
colorless lives a visit to the amusement park
brings the acme of delirious excitement. It is
possible that these children are the inevitable
product of city life; in Paris, little girls at local
fetes wishing to ride on the hobby horse fre-
quently buy the privilege at a fearful price from
the man directing the machinery, and a physician
connected with the New York Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children writes: "It
is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or a
quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of
these children."
The home environment of such children has
been similar to that of many others who come to
grief through the five-cent theatres. These
eager little people, to whom life has offered few
pleasures, crowd around the door hoping to be
taken in by some kind soul and, when they have
been disappointed over and over again and the
last performance is about to begin, a little girl
may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chas-
tity for an entrance fee.
Many children are also found who have been [112]
decoyed into their first wrong-doing through the
temptation of the saloon, in spite of the fact that
one of the earliest regulations in American cities
for the protection of children was the pro-
hibition of the sale of liquor to minors. That
children may be easily demoralized by the
influence of a disorderly saloon was demonstrated
recently in Chicago; one of these saloons was so
situated that the pupils of a public school were
obliged to pass it and from the windows of the
schoolhouse itself could see much of what was
passing within the place. An effort was made by
the Juvenile Protective Association to have it
closed by the chief of police, but although he
did so, it was opened again the following day.
The Association then took up the matter with
the mayor, who refuses to interfere, insisting
that the objectionable features had been elimi-
nated. Through months of effort, during which
time the practices of the place remained quite
unchanged, one group after another of public-
spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what
had become a public scandal, only to find that
the place was protected by brewery interests
which were more powerful, both financially and [113]
politically, than themselves. At last, after a
peculiarly flagrant case involving a little girl,
the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a
mass meeting in the schoolhouse itself, inviting
local officials to be present. The mothers then
produced a mass of testimony which demon-
strated that dozens and hundreds of children
had been directly or indirectly affected by the
place whose removal they demanded. A meet-
ing so full of genuine anxiety and righteous indig-
nation could not well be disregarded, and the
compulsory education department was at last
able to obtain a revocation of the license. The
many people who had so long tried to do away
with this avowedly disreputable saloon received
a fresh impression of the menace to children
who became sophisticated by daily familiarity
with vice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by
poverty, are obliged to rent houses next to vicious
neighborhoods and their children very early
become familiar with all the outer aspects of
vice. Among them are the children of widows
who make friends with their dubious neigh-
bors during the long days while their mothers
are at work. I recall two sisters in one [114]
family whose mother had moved her household
to the borders of a Chicago segregated district,
apparently without knowing the character of
the neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and
eight years old, accepted many invitations from
a kind neighbor to come into her house to see
her pretty things. The older girl was delighted
to be "made up" with powder and paint and to
try on long dresses, while the little one who sang
very prettily was taught some new songs, happily
without understanding their import. The tired
mother knew nothing of what the children did
during her absence, until an honest neighbor who
had seen the little girls going in and out of the
district, interfered on their behalf. The fright-
ened mother moved back to her old neighborhood
which she had left in search of cheaper rent, her
pious soul stirred to its depths that the children
for whom she patiently worked day by day had
so narrowly escaped destruction.
Who cannot recall at least one of these des-
perate mothers, overworked and harried through
a long day, prolonged by the family washing and
cooking into the evening, followed by a night of
foreboding and misgiving because the very [115]
children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly
slipping away from her control and affection?
Such a spectacle forces one into an agreement
with Wells, that it is a "monstrous absurdity"
that women who are "discharging their supreme
social function, that of rearing children, should
do it in their spare time, as it were, while they
'earn their living' by contributing some half-
mechanical element to some trivial industrial
product." Nevertheless, such a woman whose
wages are fixed on the basis of individual subsist-
ence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage,
is still held by a legal obligation to support her
children with the desperate penalty of forfeiture
if she fail.
I can recall a very intelligent woman who long
brought her children to the Hull House day
nursery with this result at the end of ten years
of devotion: the little girl is almost totally
deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles,
because her mother could not stop work in order
to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg
flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been
arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in
spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, [116]
have been such habitual truants that their
natural intelligence has secured little aid from
education. Of the five children three are now
in semi-penal institutions, supported by the
state. It would not therefore have been so un-
economical to have boarded them with their
own mother, requiring a standard of nutrition
and school attendance at least up to that national
standard of nurture which the more advanced
European governments are establishing.
The recent Illinois law, providing that the
children of widows may be supported by public
funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile
court, will eventually restore a mother's care to
these poor children; but in the meantime, even
the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in her
forced search for cheap rent may be continually led
nearer to the notoriously evil districts. Many
appeals made to landlords of disreputable houses
in Chicago on behalf of the children living adja-
cent to such property have never secured a
favorable response. It is apparently difficult
for the average property owner to resist the high
rents which houses in certain districts of the
city can command if rented for purposes of vice. [117]
I recall two small frame houses identical in
type and value standing side by side. One
which belonged to a citizen without scruples was
rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to
a conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month.
The supposedly respectable landlords defend
themselves behind the old sophistry: "If I did
not rent my house for such a purpose, someone
else would," and the more hardened ones say
that "It is all in the line of business." Both of
them are enormously helped by the secrecy sur-
rounding the ownership of such houses, although
it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of
the owner and the agent of every multiple house
to be posted in the public hallway will at length
break through this protection, and the discovered
landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to
which the law specifically states they have made
themselves liable. In the meantime, women
forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one
more handicap in addition to the many others
poverty places upon them. Such experiences
may explain the fact that English figures show
a very large proportion of widows and deserted
women among the prostitutes in those large [118]
towns which maintain segregated districts.
The deprivation of a mother's care is most
frequently experienced by the children of the
poorest colored families who are often forced to
live in disreputable neighborhoods because they
literally cannot rent houses anywhere else.
Both because rents are always high for colored
people and because the colored mothers are
obliged to support their children, seven times
as many of them, in proportion to their entire
number, as of the white mothers, the actual
number of colored children neglected in the midst
of temptation is abnormally large. So closely
is child life founded upon the imitation of what
it sees that the child who knows all evil is almost
sure in the end to share it. Colored children
seldom roam far from their own neighborhoods:
in the public playgrounds, which are theoretically
open to them, they are made so uncomfortable
by the slights of other children that they learn
to stay away, and, shut out from legitimate rec-
reation, are all the more tempted by the careless,
luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addi-
tion to the colored girls who have thus from
childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects [119]
of vice, are others who are sent into the district
in the capacity of domestic servants by unscru-
pulous employment agencies who would not
venture to thus treat a white girl. The com-
munity forces the very people who have con-
fessedly the shortest history of social restraint,
into a dangerous proximity with the vice districts
of the city. This results, as might easily be
predicted, in a very large number of colored
girls entering a disreputable life. The negroes
themselves believe that the basic cause for the
high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent
enslavement of their race with its attendant
unstable marriage and parental status, and point
to thousands of slave sales that but two genera-
tions ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at
family life. Knowing this as we do, it seems all
the more unjustifiable that the nation which is re-
sponsible for the broken foundations of this family
life should carelessly permit the negroes, making
their first struggle towards a higher standard of
domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant
temptations which our civilization tolerates.
The imaginations of even very young children
may easily be forced into sensual channels. [120]
A little girl, twelve years old, was one day
brought to the psychopathic clinic connected
with the Chicago juvenile court. She had been
detained under police surveillance for more than
a week, while baffled detectives had in vain tried
to verify the statements she had made to her
Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certain
horrible experiences which had befallen her.
For at least a week no one concerned had the
remotest idea that the child was fabricating.
The police thought that she had merely grown
confused as to the places to which she had been
"carried unconscious." The mother gave the
first clue when she insisted that the child had
never been away from her long enough to have
had these experiences, but came directly home
from school every afternoon for her tea, of which
she habitually drank ten or twelve cups. The
skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly
establishing the fact of a disordered mind, dis-
closed an astonishing knowledge of the habits of
the underworld.
Even children who live in respectable neigh-
borhoods and are guarded by careful parents so
that their imaginations are not perverted, but [121]
only starved, constantly conduct a search for
the magical and impossible which leads them
into moral dangers. An astonishing number of
them consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune
tellers. These dealers in futurity, who sell only
love and riches, the latter often dependent upon
the first, are sometimes in collusion with dis-
reputable houses, and at the best make the path
of normal living more difficult for their eager
young patrons. There is something very pathetic
in the sheepish, yet radiant, faces of the boy
and girl, often together, who come out on the
street from a dingy doorway which bears the
palmist's sign of the spread-out hand. This
remnant of primitive magic is all they can find
with which to feed their eager imaginations,
although the city offers libraries and galleries,
crowned with man's later imaginative achieve-
ments. One hard-working girl of my acquaint-
ance, told by a palmist that "diamonds were
coming to her soon," afterwards accepted with-
out a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond
ring from a man whose improper attentions she
had hitherto withstood.
In addition to these heedless young people, [122]
pulled into a sordid and vicious life through
their very search for romance, are many little
children ensnared by means of the most innocent
playthings and pleasures of childhood. Perhaps
one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as it
exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring
of little girls who are too young to have received
adequate instruction of any sort and whose
natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has
been broken down by the overcrowding of tene-
ment house life. Any educator who has made a
careful study of the children from the crowded
districts is impressed with the numbers of them
whose moral natures are apparently unawakened.
While there are comparatively few of these non-
moral children in anyone neighborhood, in the
entire city their number is far from negligible.
Such children are used by disreputable people
to invite their more normal playmates to house
parties, which they attend again and again,
lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually
learn to trust the vicious hostess. The head of
one such house, recently sent to the penitentiary
upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile
Protective Association, founded her large and [123]
successful business upon the activities of three
or four little girls who, although they had gradu-
ally come to understand her purpose, were appar-
ently so chained to her by the goodies and favors
which they received, that they were quite indif-
ferent to the fate of their little friends. Such
children, when brought to the psychopathic clinic
attached to the Chicago juvenile court, are
sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or
other physical disabilities from which their
conduct may be at least partially accounted for.
Sometimes they come from respectable families,
but more often from families where they have
been mistreated and where dissolute parents
have given them neither affection nor protection.
Many of these children whose relatives have
obviously contributed to their delinquency are
helped by the enforcement of the adult delin-
quency law.
One looks upon these hardened little people
with a sense of apology that educational forces
have not been able to break into their first igno-
rance of life before it becomes toughened into
insensibility, and one knows that, whatever may
be done for them later, because of this early [124]
neglect, they will probably always remain im-
pervious to the gentler aspects of life, as if vice
seared their tender minds with red-hot irons.
Our public-school education is so nearly uni-
versal, that if the entire body of the teachers
seriously undertook to instruct all American
youth in regard to this most important aspect
of life, why should they not in time train their
pupils to continence and self-direction, as they
already discipline their minds with knowledge
in regard to many other matters? Certainly
the extreme youth of the victims of the white
slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a great
responsibility upon the educational forces of the
community.
The state which supports the public school is
also coming to the rescue of children through
protective legislation. This is another illustration
that the beginnings of social advance have often
resulted from the efforts to defend the weakest
and least-sheltered members of the community.
The widespread movement which would protect
children from premature labor, also prohibits
them from engaging in occupations in which
they are subjected to moral dangers. Several [125]
American cities have of late become much con-
cerned over the temptations to which messenger
boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly
subjected when their business takes them into
vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission
makes a plea for these "children of the night"
that they shall be protected by law from those
temptations which they are too young and too
untrained to withstand. New York and Wis-
consin are the only states which have raised the
legal age of messenger boys employed late at
night to twenty-one years. Under the inadequate
sixteen-year limit, which regulates night work
for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to
grief through their familiarity with the social
evil. One of these, a delicate boy of seventeen,
had been put into the messenger service by his
parents when their family doctor had recom-
mended out-of-door work. Because he was well-
bred and good-looking, he became especially
popular with the inmates of disreputable houses.
They gave him tips of a dollar and more when he
returned from the errands which he had executed
for them, such as buying candy, cocaine or
morphine. He was inevitably flattered by their [126]
attentions and pleased with his own popularity.
Although his mother knew that his duties as a
messenger boy occasionally took him to dis-
reputable houses, she fervently hoped his early
training might keep him straight, but in the end
realized the foolhardiness of subjecting an im-
mature youth to these temptations. The vice
commission report gives various detailed in-
stances of similar experiences on the part of
other lads, one of them being a high-school boy
who was merely earning extra money as a messen-
ger boy during the rush of Christmas week.
The regulations in Boston, New York, Cin-
cinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis for the safe-
guarding of these children may be but a forecast
of the care which the city will at last learn to
devise for youth under special temptations.
Because the various efforts made in Chicago to
obtain adequate legislation for the protection
of street-trading children have not succeeded,
incidents like the following have not only occurred
once, but are constantly repeated: a pretty little
girl, the only child of a widowed mother, sold
newspapers after school hours from the time she
was seven years old. Because her home was [127]
near a vicious neighborhood and because the
people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked
for change when they bought a paper and good-
naturedly gave her many little presents, her
mother permitted her to gain a clientele within
the district on the ground that she was too young
to understand what she might see. This con-
tinued familiarity, in spite of her mother's ad-
monitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably
resulted in so vitiating the standard of the growing
girl, that at the age of fourteen she became an
inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance
concerns three little girls who habitually sold
gum in one of the segregated districts. Because
they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-
hearted policemen who felt that they ought not
to be in such a neighborhood, each one of these
children had obtained a special permit from the
mayor of the city in order to protect herself from
"police interference." While the mayor had
no actual authority to issue such permits, natu-
rally the piece of paper bearing his name, when
displayed by a child, checked the activity of
the police officer. The incident was but one more
example of the old conflict between mistaken [128]
kindness to the individual child in need of money,
and the enforcement of those regulations which
may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one
child, but save a hundred others from entering
occupations which can only lead into blind alleys.
Because such occupations inevitably result in
increasing the number of unemployables, the
educational system itself must be challenged.
A royal commission has recently recommended
to the English Parliament that "the legally per-
missible hours for the employment of boys be
shortened, that they be required to spend the
hours so set free, in physical and technological
training, that the manufacturing of the unem-
ployable may cease." Certainly we are justified
in demanding from our educational system, that
the interest and capacity of each child leaving
school to enter industry, shall have been studied
with reference to the type of work he is about to
undertake. When vocational bureaus are prop-
erly connected with all the public schools, a
girl will have an intelligent point of departure
into her working life, and a place to which she
may turn in time of need, for help and advice
through those long and dangerous periods of [129]
unemployment which are now so inimical to her
character.
This same British commission divided all of
the unemployed, the under-employed, and the
unemployable as the results of three types of
trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein
women and children are paid wages insufficient
to maintain them at the required standard of
health and industrial efficiency, so that their
wages must be supplemented by relatives or
charity; second, labor deteriorating trades,
which have sapped the energy, the capacity,
the character, of workers; third, bare subsistence
trades, where the worker is forced to such a low
level in his standard of life that he continually
falls below self-support. We have many trades
of these three types in America, all of them
demanding the work of young and untrained girls.
Yet, in spite of the obvious dangers surrounding
every girl who enters one of them, little is done
to guide the multitude of children who leave
school prematurely each year into reasonable
occupations.
Unquestionably the average American child
has received a more expensive education than [130]
has yet been accorded to the child of any other
nation. The girls working in department stores
have been in the public schools on an average
of eight years, while even the factory girls,
who so often leave school from the lower grades,
have yet averaged six and two-tenths years of
education at the public expense, before they
enter industrial life. Certainly the community
that has accomplished so much could afford
them help and oversight for six and a half years
longer, which is the average length of time that
a working girl is employed. The state might
well undertake this, if only to secure its former
investment and to save that investment from
utter loss.
Our generation, said to have developed a
new enthusiasm for the possibilities of child
life, and to have put fresh meaning into the
phrase "children's rights," may at last have the
courage to insist upon a child's right to be well
born and to start in life with its tiny body free
from disease. Certainly allied to this new un-
derstanding of child life and a part of the same
movement is the new science of eugenics with its
recently appointed university professors. Its [131]
organized societies publish an ever-increasing
mass of information as to that which constitutes
the inheritance of well-born children. When
this new science makes clear to the public that
those diseases which are a direct outcome of the
social evil are clearly responsible for race dete-
rioration, effective indignation may at last be
aroused, both against the preventable infant
mortality for which these diseases are responsible,
and against the ghastly fact that the survivors
among these afflicted children infect their con-
temporaries and hand on the evil heritage to
another generation. Public societies for the
prevention of blindness are continually distrib-
uting information on the care of new-born
children and may at length answer that old,
confusing question "Did this man sin or his
parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowl-
edge is becoming more widespread every day
and the rising interest in infant welfare must in
time re-act upon the very existence of the social
evil itself.
This new public concern for the welfare of little
children in certain American cities has resulted
in a municipal milk supply; in many German [132]
cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York,
Chicago, Boston and other large towns, employ
hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct
tenement-house mothers upon the care of little
children. Doubtless all of this enthusiasm for
the nurture of children will at last arouse public
opinion in regard to the transmission of that one
type of disease which thousands of them annu-
ally inherit, and which is directly traceable to
the vicious living of their parents or grand-
parents. This slaughter of the innocents, this
infliction of suffering upon the new-born, is so
gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question
of time until an outraged sense of justice shall
be aroused on behalf of these children. But
even before help comes through chivalric senti-
ments, governmental and municipal agencies will
decline to spend the tax-payers' money for the
relief of suffering infants, when by the exertion
of the same authority they could easily provide
against the possibility of the birth of a child so
afflicted. It is obvious that the average tax-
payer would be moved to demand the exter-
mination of that form of vice which has been
declared illegal, although it still flourishes by [133]
official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend
that it is responsible for the existence of these
diseases which cost him so dear. It is only his
ignorance which makes him remain inert until
each victim of the white slave traffic shall be
avenged unto the third and fourth generation
of them that bought her. It is quite possible
that the tax-payer will himself contend that,
as the state does not legalize a marriage without
a license officially recorded, that the status of
children may be clearly defined, so the state
would need to go but one step further in the same
direction, to insist upon health certificates from
the applicant for a marriage license, that the
health of future children might in a certain meas-
ure, be guaranteed. Whether or not this step
may be predicted, the mere discussion of this
matter in itself, is an indication of the changing
public opinion, as is the fact that such legislation
has already been enacted in two states, which
are only now putting into action the recommenda-
tion made centuries ago by such social philoso-
phers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense
of justice outraged by the wanton destruction of
new-born children, may in time unite with that [134]
ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture
of the young, until the old barriers of silence and
inaction, behind which the social evil has so long
intrenched itself, shall at last give way.
Certainly it will soon be found that the senti-
ment of pity, so recently aroused throughout the
country on behalf of the victims of the white
slave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them
protection unless it becomes incorporated in
government. It is possible that we are on the
eve of a series of legislative enactments similar
to those which resulted from the attempts to
regulate child labor. Through the entire course
of the last century, in that anticipation of coming
changes which does so much to bring changes
about, the friends of the children were steadily
engaged in making a new state, from the first
child labor law passed in the English parlia-
ment in 1803 to the final passage of the so-called
children's charter in 1909. During the long
century of transforming pity into political action
there was created that social sympathy which
has become one of the greatest forces in modern
legislation, and to which we may confidently
appeal in this new crusade against the social [135]
evil.
Another point of similarity to the child labor
movement is obvious, for the friends of the
children early found that they needed much
statistical information and that the great problem
of the would-be reformer is not so much over-
coming actual opposition-the passing of time
gradually does that for him-as obtaining and
formulating accurate knowledge and fitting
that knowledge into the trend of his time.
From this point of view and upon the basis of
what has already been accomplished for "the
protection of minors," the many recent investi-
gations which have revealed the extreme youth
of the victims of the white slave traffic, should
make legislation on their behalf all the more
feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever
more legitimately make an emotional appeal to
the higher sensibility of the public.
In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago
by the White Slave Traffic Committee of the
League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages
of the little girls who were brought there horrified
the good clubwomen more than any other aspect
of the situation. A number of the little inmates [136]
in the home wanted to play with dolls and several
of them brought dolls of their own, which they
had kept with them through all their vicissitudes.
There is something literally heart-breaking in
the thought of these little children who are en-
snared and debauched when they are still young
enough to have every right to protection and
care. Quite recently I visited a home for semi-
delinquent girls against each one of whom stood
a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity.
Upon each of the little white beds or on one of
the stiff chairs standing by its side was a doll
belonging to a delinquent owner still young
enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of
childhood. I had come to the home prepared
to "lecture to the inmates." I remained to dress
dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly
asked questions about the dolls I had once
possessed in a childhood which seemed to them
so remote. Looking at the little victims who
supply the white slave trade, one is reminded of
the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly uttered
in response to the demand that the social evil
be legalized and its victims licensed. He says:
"Where shall we look to recruit the ever-failing [137]
ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly
by the tens of thousands? Which of the little
girls of our land shall we designate for this traffic?
Mark their sweet innocence to-day as they run
about in our streets and parks prattling and
playing, ever busy about nothing; which of them
shall we snatch as they approach maturity, to
supply this foul mart?"
It is incomprehensible that a nation whose
chief boast is its free public education, that a
people always ready to respond to any moral or
financial appeal made in the name of children,
should permit this infamy against childhood to
continue! Only the protection of all children
from the menacing temptations which their
youth is unable to withstand, will prevent some
of them from falling victims to the white slave
traffic; only when moral education is made
effective and universal will there be hope for the
actual abolition of commercialized vice. These
are illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity
of which society is so rapidly becoming conscious.
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